Creating the Node application

The first step will be to create a folder. Every project we create will go live inside of its own folder. I'll open up the Finder on macOS and navigate to my desktop. What I'd like you to do is open up the desktop on your OS, whether you're on Linux, Windows, or macOS, and create a brand new folder called hello-world.

Now I'll use command + O (Ctrl + O for Windows users) to open up, and I'll navigate to the desktop and double-click my hello-world folder, as shown here:

On the left I have my files, which are none. So, let's create a new one. I'll make a new file in the root of the project, and we'll call this one app.js, as shown here:

This will be the only file we have inside our Node application, and in this file we can write some code that will get executed when we start the app.

In the future, we'll be doing crazy stuff like initializing databases and starting web servers, but for now we'll simply use console.log, which means we're accessing the log property on the console object. It's a function, so we can call it with parentheses, and we'll pass in one argument as string, Hello world!. I'll toss a semicolon on the end and save the file, as shown in the following code:

console.log('Hello world!');

This will be the first app we run.